Today I swung by my alma mater to attend a lecture hosted by Vint Cerf, without whom we wouldn’t be surfing the Internet today, entitled “Internet in the 21st Century“. An illustrious figure indeed, and very well spoken as well, Vint is currently the Chief Internet Evangelist and vice president over at Google. A title like that is wicked cool I reckon… evangelising the Internet…

With such a prestigious speaker, the room was obviously packed; a computer science junkie gala of sorts. Notably, amongst the crowd was Steve Bourne, whom I shook hands with without realizing it was THE Steve Bourne. Phew, what an honor. In any case, the topic of the day was about the Internet and what better person to talk about it other than the man dubbed “the father of the internet”?

Computer Science?

As one of the first topics, Vint brought up a series of points in view of “uncovering the science in Computer Science”. I found this to be rather amusing, because after taking a few psychology & phsyics courses in university, I was also wondering where the “science” in CS came from! A “science” gets its name from the application of the scientific method; i.e. the best way to establish that something is a fact is by predicting a result through a hypothesis, and proving it by a defined and consistently repeatable procedure. Computer Science (CS), on the other hand encompasses more than the factual and predictable data; in CS, one of the things we learn is how to prove that we cannot predict that a computer program will halt. Ironic indeed! Like mathematics, CS is largely dependent on proofs rather than empirical evidence.

The design of the Internet

The next topic was about the historics of the Internet. Vint explained good software engineering decisions taken in the beginning, such as the layered design and low coupling between those layers was at the base of TCP/IP. Such thoughts burgeoned while working on the ARPANET. He also went over the ignorant nature of packets, which I have mentioned in a previous post presumptiously called “The unified theory… of bits and bytes over the internet & law” (written under the influence I must admit!). As he went on talking about the profound impact upon regulations, and how current ones aren’t very well prepared for the current EXPLOSION (purportedly a factor of 20 from 1997!) of internet use; I could sense a tint of network neutrality hippiness (yes hippiness). Very nice indeed to hear first hand such an important figure speaking out on this topic.

The next topics were about the shortcomings and downfalls of the initial design; such as security, mobility and persistence. Mobile IP’s, authentication, encryption, sensor networks and other solutions (or rather stand-ins before solid solutions are implemented) were discussed. An interesting observation on his part is that most security problems are a matter of configuration; as there is no way to verify configurations. A very tough problem indeed, in view of our current quasi-total dependence on configuration.

The state of the Internet nowadays (without buzz words)

Somebody explained Web 2.0 without using the buzz word! Hurray! Rather, he used the catch-all term “User Oriented Paradigms”, composed of the notions of:

1. Self Service
2. Announce-Share, Collaborate
3. Search, discover, transact

Vint explained the premises of Google Adsense as well (without mentioning the name of it), explaining that the democratization of the Internet makes contextual advertising even more powerful. Taking another stab at network neutrality, he went on to say that Amazon, Google, eBay amongst others could never have started without that basic premise of network neutrality. He reiterated the observation that the new Internet is on the verge of significantly altering anything from regulations to social behavior and evidently business.

On another topic, Vint explained that these shenanigans are changing information management significantly. Geolocational indexing is becoming more and more in demand and time indexing is becoming harder to achieve. He postulates that information decay may be akin to tooth decay; i.e. requiring some brushing everyday.

Things to be (In managementese: Moving forward)

About the future of science & engineering in general, he predicts that a boom in interest, similar to the Sputnik chain of events, is looming, having as primary vehicle global warming. Interesting problems will need to be solved and predicted, causing a hypothetical raise in interest in Computer Science. Since the dot-crash enrollment in this field is at a low, and keeps dipping.

The future of the Internet lies in space. A project called InterPlaNet (IPN) is in the works to attempt to solve the problems of communication over astronomical (literally!) distances. Because of the huge delays, variations of distance and signal strength, TCP/IP does not hold up very well in those applications. Fortunately, due to the layered architecture, TCP/IP can be used in smaller scales and another layer can be used to handle inter planetary communications, using a mechanism similar to messaging. This is being tested in environments with similar constraints, such as in the military, and in Sameland. Interestingly, this attempts solves the mobility and persistence problems cited before as well as solving the latency issues.

Epilogue

In the end, my opinion is that this lecture was very entertaining. It was quite an honor to hear THE man talk, in the company of other distinguished computer scientists. Thanks Elliot (our head honcho @ Tucows) for introducing Glenn (my co-worker) and myself to both Vint and Steve. Others, be there next time!

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 @ 1:34 am software
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